The latest effort to portray Iran as a rogue nation centers around something called “Murky Water,” a secret plan by Iran’s Pasdaran to pollute the Persian Gulf and shut down oil shipments in response to increasingly stringent sanctions placed on the country.

The story surfaced on the German website Spiegel Online earlier this week. It centers on General Mohammed Ali Jafari, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, also known as the Pasdaran, described as “a more effective military force than the regular army” that has “developed into a state within the state,” according to Erich Follath.

Jafari and his supporters are allegedly preparing new horrors to compliment previous ones (for instance, the widely debunked claim that Iran wants to “wipe Israel off the map”), according to Spiegel Online. Western intelligence agencies have allegedly acquired a plan marked “top secret” and code-named “Murky Water.”

“Together with Ali Fadawi, an admiral in the Pasdaran, Jafari is thought to have proposed a senseless act of sabotage: to intentionally cause an environmental catastrophe in the Strait of Hormuz,” Follath writes.

The goal of the plan seems to be that of contaminating the strait so as to temporarily close the important shipping route for international oil tankers, thereby “punishing” the Arab countries that are hostile to Iran and forcing the West to join Iran in a large-scale cleanup operation — one that might require the temporary suspension of sanctions against Tehran.

The masked CIA agent, Reza Kahlili.

If there is anything “murky” about the supposed plan, it is the source – “Western intelligence officials,” likely of the same caliber that brought us Saddam’s illusory weapons of mass destruction and provided a pretext for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The latest demonization effort is reminiscent of the Imam Madhi farce perpetuated by the masked man Reza Kahlili, who we are told worked for the CIA and was deep under cover inside the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. According to the masked CIA agent Kahlili, Iran’s religious leaders are waiting for the “Last Six Months” foretold in centuries-old hadiths prior the appearance of the last Islamic messiah. They believe the situation in Syria may be the ticket.

As Jeremy R. Hammond notes, there was no “intelligence failure” in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq that ultimately claimed 1.5 million Iraqi lives. “On the contrary, there was an extremely successful disinformation campaign coordinated by the CIA in furtherance of the government’s policy of seeking regime change in Iraq,” he writes.

The narrative that there was an “intelligence failure” leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003 cannot withstand the slightest scrutiny. The simple fact of the matter is that there was no evidence that Iraq still possessed WMD. The fact of the matter is that top experts in their respective fields within the U.S. intelligence community had correctly assessed that Iraq did not have WMD or ongoing WMD programs. The CIA’s judgments to the contrary were not the result of a “failure” within the intelligence community to correctly analyze and assess the evidence, but of a systematic effort to control information in order to limit “dissent” and stovepipe products to administration officials that would support the government’s official policy of regime change. In other words, the policy was not based on the intelligence, but the CIA’s intelligence products were rather based on the policy.

A similar systematic effort to control information and fabricate sensational stories about Iran is currently underway as the United States and Israel prepare to attack. No doubt, after Iran is reduced to a smoldering wasteland, the government will sheepishly claim it was misled by “intelligence failures” and the culprits responsible – like the culprits responsible for mass murder in Iraq – will once again remain free.